Piazza Santa Croce

I returned to Florence on Sunday for another short trip - and what was interesting was that the hotel I was staying in took me to some slightly different haunts to those I usually frequent.

I arrived quite early in the day, and after a couple of hours resting in the hotel, and took a wander out in mid afternoon for the inevitable gelato. My wander took me through the Piazza Santa Croce, and I was delighted to catch sight of the Palazzo Vecchio through a gap in the buildings.

Later on, I went for dinner with a couple of friends, and then on to Le Murate, a repurposing of what started life as a convent, and then morphed into a Napoleonic era prison, and is now a mixed housing/office/entertainment redevelopment where the Florentines like to watch their football out of doors. A huge crowd of people were watching "the match", and we were amongst the very few who were supporting Germany (lots of Italians emigrated to Argentina and there's a fair amount of return migration too). At the end of normal time, I decided to go back to the hotel and watch the extra time and - as I thought - penalties in my room, because I wanted to get to sleep as soon as possible after it finished, as I had an early start the following morning. Hmmmm... Back to the hotel to discover that their TV system was completely broken and the internet was woefully inadequate for any sort of web browsing. I sort of managed to follow the last part of extra time on twitter, but I was pretty pissed off that the consequence of trying to be sensible meant I missed the only and decisive goal....